Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘And that top form is very much appreciated, I promise you. Whenever you’re around, peptox sales fall dramatically.’

  Angela snuggled up closer and gave him another sip from the crystal flute. ‘Housden, you don’t have to answer this, but are you a one-in-ten?’

  He shook his head. ‘No babe, I’m not. I was born before that became available. Missed by five years so my father said. Why, does that bother you?’

  ‘Not really, no. Besides, you should be able to rejuvenate soon. They say Bartram is close to proving the procedure.’

  He raised a glass. ‘Here’s hoping.’

  They ate the rest of the barbecue as the rocketplanes zoomed round and round overhead. By the time the last race, the champions finale, was over, Angela was back in pocket by three quarters of a million. ‘Damnit!’ Housden was down one and a half.

  ‘Don’t be so grumpy,’ she teased. ‘Together we’re still in front.’

  ‘Yeah, but we’re not married yet.’

  The fountains began to lower their dancing veil of spray, allowing the guests to see the opposite shore of the lake for the first time. The applause which burst out when they saw the grand finale to the party was long and enthusiastic.

  ‘He’s got to be kidding,’ Angela said. Above the shore, an incredibly old-fashioned silver rocket crucified by a dozen potent spotlights sat on a big concrete pad. White mist oozed sensually down its frost-webbed sides. An implausibly small blue-grey capsule squatted on top, while the scarlet escape rocket at the apex appeared to be some kind of primitive afterthought. Next to it, the crude gantry tower, which was half cables and pipes, had a thick arm extending out against the capsule.

  ‘No he’s not,’ Housden replied. ‘I heard about this. It’s a Mercury Atlas.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A space rocket, with a one-man capsule on the top. It’s a full-scale replica of the first rocket America used to send an astronaut into orbit. There’s a proper network installed instead of the old electronics, and some modern safety systems in the capsule, but essentially it’s a 1960s orbital space mission.’

  ‘And it’s going to fly?’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s real. Matiff’s cousin Nanjit is going to do the honours.’

  ‘Nanjit is going to fly into orbit?’ she said indignantly. ‘That toxhead?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to do anything, and it’s only a couple of orbits. He’ll splash down in the Tanyic Sea, eighty miles away. Matiff imported some boats and recovery helicopters specially for it.’

  ‘Son-of-a-bitch! How much is this costing him?’

  ‘Sixty – seventy million, they said. He had to commission Boeing-Zian to build it for him. It wasn’t easy, there aren’t any original blueprints left. Their designers had to retro-engineer the capsule and the rocket from museum pieces. Apparently he had to promise to sponsor two exhibitions at the Smithsonian just to get them the kind of access they needed.’

  Angela giggled wildly. ‘This is going to start a party arms race.’ She twisted round to see the elated Prince standing at the front of his grand Bedouin-style pavilion atop the slope, taking bow after bow. That was when she noticed a couple of 2Norths at his side, looking relaxed and contented. There was something wrong with that scene – Northumberland Interstellar and the Prince’s family bioil conglomerate weren’t quite rivals, but there was no love lost between the two.

  Giant projectors came on at the foot of the slope, showing Nanjit getting out of a truck at the base of the gantry tower. He was in a bulky silver spacesuit with a dull-orange bubble helmet. It certainly looked authentic, even down to the ribbed hoses plugged into sockets on his chest that connected to a metal life-support case one of the support team was carrying behind him.

  Another cheer went up.

  Angela told her e-i to call her father again, using full priority this time. He still didn’t respond. Now that was completely wrong. She connected to their estate’s AI, and closed her eyes against the crazy Space Race re-enactment so her netlenses could provide a clear visual.

  ‘Is my father in the mansion?’ she asked the software.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In his private study.’

  ‘Use the internal sensors and give me a visual.’

  ‘I am unable to comply.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The sensors in that room have been disabled.’

  The warmth she’d basked in so adoringly – warmth from champagne, the evening air, the party, of becoming engaged – deserted her flesh. ‘Who disabled them?’

  ‘Your father must have done it. He is the last person I have a record of entering that room.’

  ‘Shit.’ She stood abruptly. ‘Tell the crew to get my jet ready,’ she told her e-i. ‘I’m leaving now.’

  ‘What is it?’ Housden asked in concern.

  ‘It’s Dad, he’s deliberately taken himself out of contact.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  Angela gave him a mildly exasperated shrug.

  ‘Okay, yeah,’ he admitted contritely. ‘That was stupid of me.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Talk to the fool, find out what the matter is.’ As she said it she noticed the market alert for bioil had risen to full amber. The surplus coursing into the GE was higher than it had been since 2095, when the formation of the Human Defence Alliance crippled national budgets and plunged the trans-stellar worlds into a recession they still hadn’t fully recovered from.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Angela hesitated. ‘That’s very gallant, but I can take care of this. You stay and enjoy Nanjit getting blown up.’

  ‘Okay.’ He gave her a kiss. ‘That’s not exactly how I was planning to spend this particular night.’

  A chauffeured buggy pulled up beside their table.

  ‘Me neither. I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you. I still haven’t worn my leather costume. And I don’t intend that to go to waste.’

  ‘I’m going to hold you to that,’ he said levelly.

  She clambered into the buggy, which drove quickly up the slope. Her e-i told her Prince Matiff was calling. When she glanced over to his lavish pavilion she could see he was leaning on the side of his giant chair, watching her buggy.

  Down by the shore, the projectors were focused on Nanjit’s elevator as it ascended the gantry tower.

  ‘You’re not leaving us now?’ the Prince asked.

  ‘Sorry, Matiff, something’s come up.’

  ‘The correct form of address to a royal of my rank is: Your Highness.’

  What? she mouthed silently. Matiff was developing some serious asshole issues. ‘I apologize, but I have to go.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Some primitive instinct powered up Angela’s concern. When she looked back at the royal pavilion, she saw a 2North chuckling delightedly beside a grinning Matiff. It wasn’t a pleasant grin at all.

  ‘Faster,’ she told the chauffeur.

  They arrived at her plane a few minutes later, a sleek cranked-delta HyperLear LV-505z that could make Mach 3.8 at full throttle. At that speed the DeVoyal estate was barely twenty-five minutes away. She told the pilot to accelerate as hard as they could.

  They’d barely gone supersonic when her e-i flashed a red market warning in her netlenses. The GE oil surplus had now been noticed by the general market. Still more was being offered for sale by the seven largest companies working out of St Libra, enough to meet demand for a year to come, in addition to the quantity already held by the futures market. But what really disturbed her wasn’t the quantity, which was astonishing, it was the price: the seven producers were keeping level. ‘Cartel,’ she whispered. The St Libra producers – Northumberland Interstellar and the Great Eight – had collaborated and released a coordinated glut.

  Angela gripped the armrests as her muscles knotted, leaving minute platinum traces smeared across the soft leather. Console pane
s slipped out of the table in front of her, rich with more detailed graphics. And she watched in dismay as bioil prices dropped, and dropped, and kept on heading down. ‘Son-of-a-bitch,’ she grunted. ‘What’s our exposure?’ she asked the family market AI.

  ‘At the current level, thirty-seven per cent.’

  ‘Son of a motherfucker.’ And Dad wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t buying to try and stabilize the glut, wasn’t selling to cut their losses, which were already frightening. A whole year’s worth of bioil for the GE? It must have taken months – years! – to plan and manufacture this kind of overcapacity.

  She could authorize their trading floor dealers, but she didn’t have a strategy. Northumberland Interstellar, Matiff, and the others – never silent about how they hated the bioil speculators – were trying to wipe the DeVoyals and all the other bioil commodity traders out of trans-stellar space. The surplus would keep on coming, gushing through the gateway in a tide that all her money could never stop. She ought to contact the other traders, formulate a response. Do we buy it all, do we sell and sink the market? If it sank far enough, would that threaten the producers themselves? Force them to stop? The cartel must have made these same calculations as part of their preparation.

  More warnings appeared. The banks were suspending all credit to the DeVoyal finance house.

  ‘No!’ she cried. ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Now all she could do was sell their other holdings, try to shore up their repayments. And she knew exactly what would happen if she started taking losses on their other commodity reserves to fund the bioil glut they owned – the banks would start issuing repayment notices.

  ‘What do I do? Dad? Dad! Oh fucking hell.’

  When the HyperLear landed in front of the DeVoyal mansion, the surplus released by the cartel had driven the trans-stellar bioil market price down to forty-five per cent of what it had been that morning. Angela was scared now, a state she barely recognized. Any attempt at a mass buy-up now simply wasn’t going to work, not with these quantities. If you combined the resources of every futures dealer she knew, they still wouldn’t have enough money – and the glut showed no sign of slowing down, let alone ending. It was a merciless flood-and-drown operation, superbly organized.

  With the price of bioil dropping, the rest of the market was rising. A sustained low energy price was precisely the boost that the trans-stellar economy needed to raise its wings and fly out of the fifteen-year recession. The glut was a wonderful benefit to everybody. Outside the financials, share prices were already adding points, currencies strengthening. She could feel the hope and expectations of all the billions of ordinary people across the trans-stellar worlds: she knew them, their reborn optimism, their excitement kindled by the prospect of change. From Earth’s slum-maze cities to the dreary identikit new towns of the trans-stellar worlds, they’d be rejoicing for days, cheering Augustine North and his co-conspirators. Not one of them would ever notice or care that the finance market had changed, had shrunk to accommodate the end of the bioil futures floor. Why should they? The glut was good for them. For a few years, while it lasted, before the new-filled tanks were drained and bioil producers became absolute lords of control, and manipulated their prices as they wished. Nobody cared that a few rich people suffered in the transition; never had, never would.

  Like all of New Monaco’s residents, Raymond DeVoyal had built himself an enormous mansion at the centre of his ten-thousand-square-mile estate. The main double-H structure had four central courtyards, with a pedimented grand façade sprouting long symmetrical colonnade wings curving away on either side to form an extensive cour d’honneur. Gothic-dark tourelles rose from most corners, ringed by tall clerestory windows of stained glass. And at the centre was a hexagonal dome covering a big pool with its own tropical jungle, radiating a bright-emerald light straight up into the night as Angela flew low overhead.

  The HyperLear came down on the perfectly level lawn at the end of the west wing. Angela hurried over to a small buggy which one of her father’s PAs was driving. They raced under the archway to the left of the main entrance and into a courtyard. Light streamed out of every window, illuminating the square with its prim little garden sections as if the walls had trapped the day’s sunlight. Another archway, into the second courtyard, and a smaller door was open at the base of a hexagonal tower.

  Angela strode into the broad hallway. This was the private wing, the heart of the mansion, the most extravagant with interiors that put the old French Sun King’s palaces to shame. She hesitated as she came into the hall. Nearly thirty of Father’s staff were all milling round on the polished oak parquet flooring with its huge inlaid rose of ash and ebony. They wouldn’t normally so much as glance her way, let alone stare at her. But now she knew all those worried, helpless expressions as they turned to her. They’d stolen them from her.

  A couple of senior PAs and Marlak, their chief legal officer, accompanied her in the elevator up to the fifth floor. Her father’s study was a wide circular room, sticking out from the end of the mansion, as if a flying saucer had crashed into the wall and become wedged there. Its walls were completely transparent, giving him a panoramic view out over the grounds and the snowcapped mountains beyond.

  Two aides were standing outside, waiting anxiously for her. They couldn’t get in because the door wouldn’t acknowledge them, yet the security system was fully functional. Angela put her hand in the scanspace while her e-i sent her personal code into the network. The doors swung back smoothly.

  Raymond DeVoyal had known. He’d known because he’d spent the whole sixty-three years of his adult life dealing in commodities, and specializing in bioil. He knew because his intelligence gathering far outstripped anyone else in the field. He knew because the family AI’s expensive, exclusive genetic algorithms were plugged into private sensors in the trans-stellar pipe network, they sampled the money flow between banks and bioil companies, they absorbed and extrapolated tiny whispers from a thousand personal contacts in the industry. Trends were spotted weeks if not months in advance of competitors and rivals. DeVoyal was a trademark of excellence for commodities, always in profit, always an investment leader. Ahead of the game for centuries.

  So with all his knowledge and ability, two days ago Raymond had spotted the unexplained surge of bioil flowing through the GE pipes network – unexplained and unallocated. He declined Prince Matiff’s party in order to track the origin and the finance and the buyer. After an hour he knew it wasn’t coming from Orleans. The Newcastle gateway was the culprit, and the more he searched, the more flow volume he uncovered, and the more the pattern became apparent. Then came the lack of deviation on the spot market, with every St Libra bioil producer charging the same price, and fulfilling the cautious orders which started to come in. He knew the trend before anyone else. He who tried to call Augustine North personally, only to have the call rejected. He whose unrivalled understanding of the market realized a cartel had been assembled in quiet meetings and agreements that didn’t exist in any memory store, and he guessed what its terrible end game was. He saw its size. He knew the political power behind it.

  Granted this insight, he carefully disabled the cameras and sensors inside the study. Sat in his favourite antique wingback chair to watch the sun sinking behind the splendid mountains on the horizon, sipped a century-old brandy and bumped a tox, and another tox. And another, and another . . .

  Angela put her hand to his cheek, refusing to believe even though he was cold to the touch. Unmoving. His eyes wide open. Flesh pale and stiffening in rigor. Refused to believe, because that power of the mind would make all this unreal. Refusal would make Daddy be alive still.

  With slow whispering insistence, reality broke through the stubborn denial. Angela DeVoyal sank to her knees beside her dead father, and for the first time in over a decade, she started sobbing.

  Monday 11th March 2143

  Sid didn’t get out of Market Street Station until after nine o’clock. When he did it was like fleeing the scene. Hi
s fellow detectives had written him off. They nodded as he passed them in corridors, then there’d be the backward looks, the muttering, shaken heads. He could see it all without having to look.

  ‘It’s over.’

  ‘Ah man, did you hear? He’s blown it.’

  ‘O’Rouke is going to fucking crucify him.’

  ‘His fault they’re going to cut overtime for the rest of the year, the stupid turd. Did you hear how much he’s spent? We’re the ones who’ll suffer.’

  ‘Man, they set him up good.’

  Monday was a day spent doing two days’ work, checking everything, reviewing, revising. Five hours spent in the zone theatre, going meticulously through the backtrack, taking more and more time – as if he was trying to postpone the inevitable, so the whispers went. Not true, he just had to make sure there were no screw-ups, not now. More hours in Office3, enduring the accusatory silence from what was left of the team.

  Their backtrack still hadn’t found the taxi. Everything hinged on that. They’d covered all the other lines – the imported freight manifests, the forensics. None of it had produced any kind of lead. There were only three taxis left to check when he finally called it a day, handing over to the night shift. Telling them to call him the instant they found one loading up with the North’s body.

  The right taxi being in the last three was so statistically implausible as to be impossible. But he wasn’t going to call it off now – might just as well jump into the Tyne himself.

  Even though he’d promised Jacinta he’d be home hours ago to help pack, he drove round to Falconar Street and parked at the north end. The door lock on Ian’s flat flashed purple when Sid’s e-i pinged it. He frowned at the small panel, and called Ian direct.